As enterprise organizations continue to embrace the pervasiveness of video and its impact on network security, storage, content, and communication, an organization's employees, partners, and customers will expect video to be integrated into core business processes and to function more like email: easily created, shared, viewed, and searched across all devices and applications. Use cases will expand beyond the traditional broadcast-oriented model into video conversations, shared video moments such as brief screen captures or custom video messages, and interactive, personalized experiences.
As a result, distributed enterprises have moved beyond the need to simply publish a video to a website using previous-generation video players based on browser plugins or proprietary technologies, such as Adobe Flash®, Microsoft Silverlight®, and Microsoft Windows® Media. These players require specialized scripting and knowledge, are inflexible to alteration, and provide a limited number of playback environments (e.g., web only, desktop only, Windows only, Internet Explorer only, etc.) These player providers also often limit player customization to a single business use case and/or a single metadata and transcode model. Consequently, organizations that use previous-generation video players are forced to maintain a multitude of niche, single-purpose video players and providers, which are costly, decentralized, and challenging to manage over time. Enterprises and the agencies supporting them need the ability to quickly build custom player experiences across all devices and application environments via a flexible framework designed and approved for business users and with minimal development resources.